Windows 7 in the Enterprise

Introduced with Vista, BitLocker is a great security technology for laptops and other unsecured physical systems. It lets you encrypt your hard drives, thereby securing your data in case your laptop is stolen or lost. Using BitLocker is easier in Windows 7. You no longer have to perform the manual drive partitioning that Vista requires. Windows 7 BitLocker automatically creates and hides a 200MB partition on your boot drive. You can enable BitLocker by simply right-clicking your drive in Computer and selecting Turn on BitLocker from the context menu.

Windows 7 extends BitLocker's drive encryption capability to USB flash drives using a new feature called BitLocker ToGo. To access the contents of USB drives encrypted with BitLocker ToGo, you need to supply a password or pin. Just think about how many of these USB drives you have (and how many you've lost) and you'll know what an important technology this is.

Like AppLocker, BitLocker and BitLocker ToGo are only in Windows 7 Enterprise Edition. Although this edition is required to encrypt USB drives, lower editions can read and write data to encrypted USB drives if authorized credentials are provided. Down-level clients such as Vista can read from the drives if the proper credentials are supplied, but they can't write to them.

Windows 7 includes IE 8.0. After using IE 8.0 for a little while, I got hooked. I never liked IE 7.0, mainly because I found it excruciatingly slow. There's a lot to like in IE 8.0. It's fast, which provides concrete evidence of how competition from third-party vendors can result in improved Microsoft products. IE 8.0 features tabbed browsing, Web Slices for tracking favorite web content, InPrivate Browsing for anonymous web browsing, Accelerators for browsing shortcuts, and SmartScreen filters that block suspected malware and flag phishing sites with a red warning screen. There also lots of little improvements such as the ability to size your address and search bars and easy access to recently closed tabs. Unlike Firefox and Google Chrome, IE 8.0 can be managed using Group Policy. Although some people have reported site incompatibilities, I haven't run into any problems in accessing sites.

Feature-wise Windows 7 is a major release, and there are more features than I can cover here. Some of the other important features in Windows 7 include:

• Action Center. The new Action Center provides a central place to view and respond to system alerts.
• Problem Step Recorder. This feature lets end users record a series of screen shots to document a problem.
• Windows Recovery Environment. Windows RE, which is installed by default, is used to recover from system failures.
• Boot from VHD. In Windows 7, you can mount a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) just like a drive and can even boot from it. Each VHD is like a hard drive with a primary partition. Boot from VHD is useful for setting up multi-boot environments.
• Mobile Broadband. Windows 7 includes enhanced Mobile Broadband support. It now supports plug and play (PnP) for 3G cards and third-party connection managers.
• Location-aware printing. Location-aware printing enables laptops to select the best configured printer based on the system's location.

Apart from some minor driver problems, my experiences with Windows 7 have been very positive. Windows 7 fixes many of the problems that plagued Vista. Most important, Windows 7 restores a level of performance that makes your initial experience with the new OS a good one.

If you're using XP and you're already considering a desktop upgrade, I recommend bypassing Vista and jumping straight to Windows 7, even though there's no in-place upgrade from XP to Windows 7. You'll have the best experience installing Windows 7 on new hardware. Windows 7 is everything Vista should have been. Windows 7 essentially obsoletes Vista.

If you're using XP and you want to wait a while before you upgrade, the timing of that upgrade will probably be driven by your hardware replacement cycle. The old applications and hardware devices already installed on your XP systems will likely face compatibility problems with Windows 7. Therefore, rolling out Windows 7 when you need to get new hardware makes the most sense.

If you've already upgraded to Vista, it'll probably be difficult to make a case to upgrade to Windows 7. Windows 7 is the superior OS and the upgrade path from Vista to Windows 7 is an easy one, but if you've already made the leap to Vista, you've already overcome the migration hurdles and it's too soon for most companies to undertake another upgrade cycle. Organizations currently using Vista will probably be incorporating Windows 7 primarily as new machines are purchased.

Windows 7 delivers an excellent desktop experience. Its UI is much richer than XP's UI. The usability and performance is much better in Windows 7 than in Vista. For enterprise customers, features such as BitLocker, BitLocker ToGo, PowerShell 2.0, Troubleshooting Packs, Problem Step Recorder and Windows RE make Windows 7 Microsoft's best desktop OS to date.